Mercy
by Grym
Summary: A postAuthority 12 tale. Newly elected leader of the Authority, Jack Hawksmoor must cope with a city that refuses to die and a team newly under his leadership. Chapter 1 only


**MERCY: **Chapter 1****

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A post-Authority #12 tale.  Newly elected leader of the Authority, Jack Hawksmoor must cope with a city that refuses to die and a team newly under his leadership.  Note that this is alternative timeline and ignores the ham-handed, careless character writing that was perpetrated on this series after Warren Ellis stepped aside. As a fanfic writer, I get to do that. Please read and review!

Usual disclaimers: Don't own. Not getting paid. Labor of love. That kind of thing.

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The city should have been dead. An uncanny stillness already resided in its streets and byways, undisturbed except by the solitary figure of a man in his shirtsleeves.  He limped carefully, unerringly, through the debris of the wasteland that had recently been a thriving Middle Eastern city.   Dust shifted and fanned into the air briefly at his passage, then settled again behind him to mask his silent footsteps.

Oddly out-of-place in his white oxford shirt and dusky black trousers, he passed ruined building after building, piles of rubble hardly recognizable as having once housed people, offices, lives. Fragments of concrete crumbled around empty foundations.  Iron cables, sheered into misshapen spikes, jutted through the rubble at crazy, broken-bone angles. Slick, blackened puddles of heat-destroyed glass bled shadows across the scorched ground, solid spills that had once been shop windows displaying wares now incinerated and forgotten.  

The traveler paused briefly beside these as if searching for signs of life in their translucent surfaces.  But if windows were the eyes of a city, this city had no more eyes.  If humanity was lifeblood, this city had bled out.  She told no more stories, not even to him.

Here and there, the charred remnants of human vertebrae protruded from the ash and crumbled beneath his bare feet. The sickly heat of radiation throbbed around him, searing through the particle cloud that clotted the dry air.  An unnatural grey haze hovered where the explosion had detonated only hours before, filling his lungs uncomfortably.  Although his strange connection to cities usually allowed pollution to act as nourishment, this charnel house atmosphere choked him, the burnt smell of death clawing at his throat. The city's death throes shot painfully through him, as well, threatening to cripple him before his task was complete.

Pressing his elbow tight against aching ribs, he knelt to retrieve a fallen fragment of half-melted glass.  His fingers trembled as they cradled it, a precious artifact, a lost friend.  He brushed the ashen sheen away, his lurid red eyes searching the pitted surface with the intensity of someone who ached to hear last words carried by faint, dying breath. 

Surrounded by the destruction of an entire city, Jack Hawksmoor strained to find some record of her final hours.  

Only disconnected details remained, trapped briefly in burnt glass-puddles and scattered shards: one eye wide with terror, lips twisted into an impossible scream, images of death and fear as unexpected explosions wracked the city's streets.  The clutching fingers of burning children faded quietly from the glass in his hand and, nausea twisting his stomach, Jack let the scrap slide from numb fingers. 

_Damn,_ he thought. _There's hardly anything left._

So few windows remained, the destroyed glass incapable of capturing the recent past of the city. So few stories remained as the city whimpered, voiceless, in its last hours of existence. Someone had to see.  Someone had to understand and remember. And Jack, the avatar of cities, was the only man alive who could. 

With a startling splash of crimson, a droplet of blood fell into the dust at his feet, drying immediately in the hot, still air.  Jack groaned softly, apologetically. The death pains that tore at the city cut him, intensifying the longer he lingered in the ruined streets. He dragged his sleeve across his face and it came away streaked red and black. "You can go now," he murmured to the choked air, even though the city didn't need words to understand.  "You don't have to hold on."

Knowing the city had little time left, he tried to move quickly.  He needed to see everything, but the city lacked the strength to lift him in the easy leaps that usually carried him across a cityscape.  When he sprang from the fallen cornice of an office building, it crumbled beneath his toes and dropped him in a surprised near-sprawl in the street below. Crouched amid the ruins, Jack felt the city's wrenching pain redouble, taking his breath momentarily. He leaned on a bank of plumbing pipes that stuck up out of the chaos like exposed nerves. 

"Why don't you let go?" he wondered aloud, voice weak, ragged.  "Why can't you find peace?"  He rested his head on his arms, turning gaze away from the purple stains that had begun creeping over his skin – bruises, deepening every moment he communed with the suffering city. 

Time was short. 

When he tried to stand again, the muscles in his back knotted, staggering him. The metallic taste of blood flooded his mouth, and he could feel it drip warmly down his chin. He spat, cleared his throat.  "I'm sorry," he whispered, feeling the city as it began to scream silently.  "Door."

*     *     *

Angela Spica, the Engineer, drummed her fingers nervously on the Junction Room floor where she sat. Jack hadn't checked in for hours and, as he requested, she had not tried to contact him.  "I'm mourning and memorializing, Angie," he'd explained, standing quietly framed by the flowing gold of the Carrier Doors.  "Let me do it alone."

"If the city is gone, Jack," she had responded, touching slender fingers against his arm, "you don't know how it will affect you."  The light intimacy of her gesture was rewarded by a hint of a smile, flickering across his broad, rugged face even though he avoided her eyes.  Encouraged, she pressed on. "Let me go with you. The radiation won't bother me through my armor and perhaps I can help–"

"There will be no help for a city this small," he interrupted with a firm shake of his close-cropped head.   The explosion was relatively low-yield, but definitely nuclear; everything in the central part of town will be gone. You…" He searched for words that would explain.  "You would be a stranger at the deathbed, Ang.  As much as I would love your company, I *can* call for a Door if it gets bad."

She knew it was true, but she didn't have to like it. He could step into safety in a matter of seconds, but after only ten minutes alone in the Junction Room, she regretted not pushing the subject further.  For the first hour, she paced and stared into the yellow slats of Doorspace as if they would eventually coalesce and show her Hawksmoor among the rubble of his fallen city.  When she tired of aimless wandering in the caged space of the room, she settled on the floor and created idle nanite shapes across her fingertips, tiny mechanical miracles that appeared and vanished in the space of a few minutes. After the third hour, she gave up trying to take her mind off of the silence and simply worried. It had been too long.  He should have been in contact, at the very least. Her misgivings nagged, uncomfortably laced with fear.

She had actually risen to follow him despite his wishes, wording her reasoning in her mind, preparing to reestablish radio-telepathic contact, when he pushed painfully through one of the Doors and into the room.  "My God," she breathed, her skin quickly sheathing itself in protective silver, an instinctive reaction to the vision of Jack.  Covered in ash, his black trousers were torn in several places, exposing cuts in the skin beneath the fabric. His usually neat shirt was spotted with blood that still dripped from his nose, trickled down his chin, and, horrifically, stained the corners of his eyes. Grey bruises patchworked his face and hands. 

He blinked, shaking his head numbly, and waved her supporting hands away.  "I'm okay. I'm okay," he murmured, voice muffled as if his tongue was swollen, too thick to speak coherently.  "Just checking in."

Ignoring his half-hearted protests, Angie wrapped one arm around his back and felt him lean against her gratefully.  "Sit down, Jack.  Here." He followed her lead like a child, disoriented by the shock of separating from the city, sinking to his knees on the hard floor with an aching thud.  "God, what happened down there?" 

"Nuclear bomb happened. Damn." He licked his lips a few times, swallowing dust. "City's almost dead. Wants to die, even. But it can't seem to let go.  Maybe it wants more remembered, but I – I can't stay down there long enough to cover the city on foot and it isn't capable of assisting. It isn't even capable of communicating, not really. Not anymore."  Jack shuddered, rambling in a half-whisper, reciting the images and sensations that disturbed him. "It cries, Angie. It cries. The pain…"

"Easy, Jack. It's okay."  Angie knelt beside him, her smooth metallic hands sliding over him, turning his face, touching the bruises and welts.  "You look like you've been in a battle." 

He glanced up at her and the raw hurt in his eyes made her flinch.  "I look like the city feels. Better, I imagine. Seems I connect even quicker with them these days.  Doesn't matter. Still couldn't help.  Couldn't stay … God, I'm so sorry." He buried his head in one hand, fingers seizing his hair viciously.

Shen. The Engineer called out over their shared radio telepathic link.  He's back. Would you mind bringing one of those first aid kits you put together to the Junction Room, please?  To Jack, she sympathized while gently disentangling his grip. "You aren't responsible for what happened."

"We're the Authority."  He scowled bitterly, anger slowly replacing the dazed pain and confusion in his face.  "And, as of yesterday, I'm suddenly, God-only-knows-why, the leader of the Authority.  I can help a lot of things, Angie. We *all* can help a lot of things." 

With a soft rush of feathers, Shen Li Min glided to the doorway and tucked her wings, falcon-like, to drop through the more narrow opening.  Her footsteps barely whispered on the smooth metal of the Carrier's alien floor. "Here, Angie."  Her voice was faintly accented, musical, but serious as she handed her colleague a small box marked with a red makeshift cross.  She crouched beside Jack, eyes quickly flitting over him.  "Did you find out what happened?"

Jack shrugged and leaned back against the wall with a frown.  "Does it matter? Petty dictatorships with too much power," he said bitterly.  "They're really all the same, aren't they? Totalitarian rule. Excessive poverty. A tendency for free-thinkers or protesters to simply 'disappear.' Not a nice place to live.  Certainly not a nice place to die."

Shen's dark eyes were brittle, sharp with memory.  "I know the type."

"Yes. I know you do." Jack stared up at her thoughtfully. "People never deserve that kind of life, do they? Hell, the city doesn't deserve this – this strung-out, suffering death."

"What's going on? What'd you do to yourself, Jack? We on a mission?" A voice touched with the long vowels of Amsterdam floated into the Junction Room, followed by the thin figure of the Doctor. Even behind red glasses, his eyes had the wide haziness of the occasional drug user and he meandered in just a trifle unsteadily.  Since Jenny's death, the others had noted he seemed high more frequently, more intensely.

"Went down to survey a bombed city," Jack told him, frowning as Angie's nimble fingers loosened the collar of his shirt to look at the strange, now fading bruises. Waving her away, he pushed up from the floor and leaned against the wall, feeling his strength slowly returning. The longer he was away from the destruction, the less he ached.  "Not a good situation."

The shaman joined Angie on the floor, stretching his lean body casually, a comfortable purplish shape against the silver. "That's not exactly our venue, is it?"

Jack's eyes narrowed.  "It's *my* venue."

Startled by his colleague's suddenly cold tone, the Doctor held both hands up protectively.  "Hey, Jack, all I meant was that … well, after killing God, for cryin' out loud, the affairs of one obscure little city somewhere out in the godforsaken desert seems … small."  He looked over at Angie for help.  "Well, doesn't it?"

Angie scowled at him and he had the grace to look somewhat chagrined, if confused.

Jack sighed, forcing himself to relax slightly.  "After 'killing God,' as you call it, and stopping the turdscaping of the Earth, I suppose it's only natural for everything else to seem a little less important."  He rubbed his face, tired beyond words.  "But it isn't. Every life lost is the most important thing in this universe." 

From her position on the floor, Angie could see the haunting darkness behind Jack's hooded eyes as he spoke.  He had worn that same expression a few nights ago. They had sat alone in her quarters, the late-night conversation rambling over all those philosophical issues that friends sometimes find themselves discussing_.  I never wanted to kill_, she remembered him saying sadly. _But now, it's almost a relief._  Angie stood, stepping quietly to his side, but said nothing.

Shen changed the topic neatly.  "If you're an indication of the state the city is in, Jack, it doesn't look like we're going to be much help. Surely there aren't survivors. Unless you want me to find out why it was singled out by its more powerful neighbors? I should be able to pick up transmissions, locate the source of the bomb."

He nodded grimly.  "You're right. City's unsalvageable. The people are dead.  Hell, the central business district's nothing but a crater.  We might as well look into 'why' and 'how' … since we can't do anything about 'what.'  But, there's also something else I have to do."

"What's that?" The Doctor's tone was helpful, willing, almost as if he wanted to make up for his earlier infraction.  "What still needs to be done?"

"The city's dying, not dead. It's lingering, suffering.  I can't explain much better than that, I'm afraid. But it needs…"  Jack hesitated, tension in the taut muscles of his jaw.  He could feel their eyes on him, waiting for a plan of action with the same easy respect that had characterized them when listening to Jenny Sparks. _Jenny. I won't jeopardize your—my team for my personal agenda_. "It needs to be put down, out of its misery. I can't let it suffer when there's no hope, not if I can do something about it."

"Okay.  So how do we kill a city?" The Doctor scratched his head.  "Especially after someone else already nuked it."

"Usually a city dies when its populace dies. To be uninhabited is to be soulless. There's more to it, but … I've dealt with a city like this one."  _This has nothing to do with the Authority. This is YOUR peculiar interest, Hawksmoor_, he thought."I have to go back down."

"Rest another minute," Angie suggested quietly. Jack obeyed, allowing her to finish mopping the blood and dirt from his rapidly-healing face. "I don't see how you can go back down. Look at you. The city is killing you." 

"Not killing. Killing implies deliberation. Intention." He pulled away from her hands.  

She turned his head back towards her and gently held open one black-crusted eye with her silvery fingers. "You were starting to hemorrhage, Jack. Your eyes are full of blood."

"Drop me in New York for an hour or two. I'll be fine. This city won't. It doesn't have an hour of two to lick its wounds." The anger built in his tightly restrained voice.

"Jack—"

"Angie," he continued, hissing out his only theory, "someone must still be alive down there. Lingering.  Suffering.  Like the city. Causing the city's pain to continue. Think about that."

"No one's alive, Jack.  It's not possible, surely."

"It may be. It has to be. There's no other answer that I can imagine!"  In a sudden fury, Jack slammed one fist into the wall beside him.  The others stared in shocked silence while he stood there. Bowing his head for a long moment, his clenched fingers slowly released, spreading out over the unmarred alien surface as if in apology.  

When he spoke again, his voice was more subdued. "Once I would've said that alternate universes and giant, turd-gods were impossible.  They weren't.  Although the radiation down there is vicious, the actual explosion didn't take out much of the poor quarter.  Perhaps…" He trailed off, ground his teeth for a second.  "We don't have time for this. If someone is alive, they won't be for long."  

"Well, you can't go alone this time."  Angie stepped close behind him, started to reach out to him but thought better of it and let her hands drop to her sides.  "If the city isn't communicating, you'll never find one half-dead survivor. You'll need others to help search. I can survive radiation; Apollo should be able do as well and I'm sure Midnighter won't begrudge you borrowing him for a mission."

"I've had quite a bit of experience searching for survivors," Shen offered. "One of the benefits to predatory senses and high mobility.  But, unfortunately, I'm not impervious to radiation."

Quieter now, Jack turned and glowered at them both.  "Angie, if you're one hundred percent certain you'll be safe, come with me.  Only then. Shen, not a chance. Too much of a risk. Maybe this'll sound corny coming from me, but I won't risk my people for this. You're too important to the world at large, even though I personally find the life and death of each city worth my own risk."

Angie didn't appear to hear him. Instead, her face had taken on that distant, scientific objectivity. Had any of the team known her before her transformation into the Engineer, they would recognize the faint frown of serious inquiry, her highly trained and skilled mind making leaps from theory to actuality, creating and testing in a moment.  "I think I have an idea, Shen. I think we can get you down there safely."

"I said no, Angie," Jack insisted. Angie and Shen both ignored him and after making a disapproving face – which was also ignored – his expression turned wryly humorous. "Dammit, isn't there some measure of command that goes with this new position of mine?"

Shen and Angie smiled archly at each other.  "No," they chimed together. "Why should things change?" Shen laughed softly and tousled his short, dark hair as she passed him.  "You're still the muscle and we're still the beauty _and_ the brains."

The Doctor giggled.  "I wonder what that makes me?" he mused, half to himself.

Jack harrumphed, gingerly touching a particularly dark bruise on his stubbled cheek.  "Well, I won't argue the 'beauty.'  But if you're so determined to try, I'm not so sure about the 'brains' anymore.  Radiation poisoning isn't the greatest way I can think of to make your final farewells."

Angie stared archly at him.  "What was it you were just saying about the importance of each individual life and our duty toward them?"  Smiling, she watched him gape slightly before she beckoned Shen over to stand with her in the warm glow of Doorspace.  "I can create just about anything I can imagine," she explained needlessly.  "By pulling particles from the air and mingling them with the nanites, I can extend myself and "make" things, even constructing nanites that have the potential to build others. I've been working on a small project in my off-hours, learning more about programming the little buggers and figuring sources of mass for this kind of mechanics.  It doesn't take much to produce self-replicating nanites which will take a simple function and repeat it until they burn out into disconnected particles again."

Jack blinked. "Disposable nanites?"

"Well," Angie shrugged. "It sounds better the way I describe it, but essentially yes. Disposable nanites."  Her brilliant green eyes fixed, focused on the air just in front of her lifted fingertips.  Liquid metal serpentined from her hands, writhing in the air as if alive, forming a series of fine cables, then flattening, thinning into invisibility. A light haze formed around Shen, a multiplying mechanical fog of tiny chips that hovered around both her slender form and the great wings that hung half-open behind her.  "These should strain the air, absorbing radiation for a limited time.  After an hour or so, they'll begin giving out, breaking down again. So you'll need to be back by then."  She stared at her handiwork critically.  "And don't move at your top speed, girl.  Go too fast and they might lose synch with your personal gravitational field."

Shen nodded.  Jack looked uncertain, but said nothing.

Lying stretched on the cool metal floor, the Doctor watched appreciatively.  "Do you need me to go, as well?"

Angie gave him her best warm smile, but shook her head.  "It'll take me a while to gather enough resources to create that kind of protective "cloud" again. But since you're stuck here, why not give Apollo a call for us?"  Her smile brightened, her tone faintly amused, faintly saccharine.  "I'm *sure* the dynamic duo will be happy to hear from you."

"Oh, sure." The shaman grimaced. "Just lovely. Why is it I always get the bad trips?"  But the soft focus of his eyes let Angie know that he was doing as she asked, trying to recall Apollo and the Midnighter from their "vacation" away from the Carrier. A vacation they only started this morning and which they would not appreciate having interrupted.

After speaking briefly with Jack, Shen stepped through a Door and was gone.  Jack strode forward to follow her but paused when Angie caught his sleeve.  He looked back at her through ancient eyes.

 Angie's brilliant green gaze met his steadily. "What happens when we find this survivor or survivors?"

"What do you mean?  We save them.  Bring them here.  Get treatment."  But even as he spoke, Angie knew his mind wasn't really on the saving of a single life, not now.  The torment of the city itself was written in the deep furrows of his brow, in the pain lines that had returned expectantly to his face even before he stepped through the Door.  He couldn't help it, she knew.  His sympathy for the city itself was built into him since childhood.

Angie pressed on.  "What happens to the city, Jack, if we save them?"

He turned away from her, staring into the flat void of the Door.  "I don't know."  He spoke slowly, voice heavy and dull, noncommittal.  

"You said a city didn't die until its populace was dead."

"Yes."  A simple word, full of dread.

"You said that the city is unsalvageable.  Beyond help and hurting."

"I know what you're driving at, Angie, and … I can't answer you. Not now. I …" He lifted his chin, straightening his shoulders.  "I believe what I said about human life.  That will have to be enough."

Angie nodded, letting one hand rest familiarly against his broad back.  "Be careful."  She followed him through the Door and into the fantastic heat of a newly created nuclear war zone. Neither of them knew exactly if her warning was meant for his safety or for his restraint.


End file.
